On 10th March 2025, the Nurturing the Fields of Change community centred their monthly discussion on the nature of AI and its expanding presence in our world. Months have passed since that session, but the conversation continues to impact me. We discussed data centres and climate impact, the shifting dynamics of human labour, and the ethical mazes technology presents. But what stayed with me most was the exploration of AI-generated creativity and the way in which AI produces poetry and art.
I am a writer and a poet. Words are my medium, my ritual, and my prayer. When I’m not writing essays for my MSc with the Alef Trust or articles for the Alef Field, I’m writing poetry; often to make meaning from grief, love, and mystery. So, when I encounter poetry written by AI, I cannot escape the question: Can a machine truly create art?
I will be clear on my position that I don’t think it can; at least, not in the way that matters most. At its core, AI is a predictive recognition system that weaves our data to generate something that resembles creativity. However, I would argue, that it lacks the fundamental ingredient from which true art arises: subjective experience.
To speak of subjective experience is to wade into one of the most enduring mysteries in science and philosophy: the nature of consciousness. According to Wahbeh et al. (2020), consciousness continues to defy explanation, despite the over 200 competing theories (Kuhn, 2024). The prevailing model in Western science posits that consciousness arises from neural processes in the brain (Beauregard et al., 2018). But this view has been met with substantial critique, most notably through the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ (Chalmers, 1995). This problem speaks to the explanatory gap between physical processes and qualia.
In this conversation, this gap is crucial. Because if we can’t explain human consciousness purely through physical mechanisms, how can we claim that AI can feel anything at all? Can it grieve? Can it fall in love? Can it cradle a memory so painful it reshapes the soul?
I once wrote a poem called “I Am Being Called Into Grief”, two years after my mum died.
I am being called into grief, into the soft decay of leaves.
I hear the call of the abyss, even now, in the emerging light of spring,
the whisper of the dark fall, the chasm, gently pulling.
I am being called into the soil, into the roots, into the cave and the cauldron,
and the berries of nightshade. I’m being called by Lady Poison,
by the choking bile of my own vomit.
I’m being called into nothing and into everything.
The call echoes in the deep and I coil around it like a serpent and a tadpole,
limb extended not quite fully formed; a nightmarish shape.
I’m being called into silence.
I am being called to the cordless, faceless, bloody womb of mother.
She, who bore me, and whose ashes still stick
to the very fabric of my skin.
Maybe AI knows what the stages of grief are. Maybe it has ingested hundreds of poems written by those who’ve lost loved ones. But it doesn’t know what it feels like to watch someone die, to sing at their bedside as they pass from one world into the next, or what ashes feel like against the skin of your hand.
For me, poetry emerges from this realm; of love, of loss, of the ineffable weight and messiness of being human. The machine may replicate the form, but it cannot touch the source.
So, what does this mean for us as artists, creators, and dreamers? It means we must continue to write from the soil of our own experience. We must resist the subtle seduction of ease and speed that AI offers and return to the slow, often painful, alchemy of creativity. We must write against the machine; not in opposition to technology itself, but in fierce protection of the soul within the art.
References
Beauregard, M., Trent, N. L., & Schwartz, G. E. (2018). Toward a postmaterialist psychology: Theory, research, and applications. New Ideas in Psychology, 50, 21–33. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.newideapsych.2018.02.004
Chalmers, D. J. (1995). Facing up to the problem of consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2(3), 200–219.
Kuhn, R. L. (2024). A landscape of consciousness: Toward a taxonomy of explanations and implications. Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, 190, 28–169. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pbiomolbio.2023.12.003
Wahbeh, H., Radin, D., Cannard, C., & Delorme, A. (2022). What if consciousness is not an emergent property of the brain? Observational and empirical challenges to materialistic models. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 955594. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.955594
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